Return to the Baltic

by Hilaire Belloc

  There in the night one may hear in seasons of pilgrimage great crowds of the peasantry chanting all through the vigil, from sunset to dawn, awaiting the Mass at morning, as they camp out on the slight slopes of that rising mound.

  For that famous hill is hardly a hill. It is but a wave, an isolated roll of land in the midst of the flatness.

  Czenstohowa and the Lady Church of Cracow between them are the spiritual pillars of the State. Czenstohowa has survived the floods of invasion after invasion, the ebb and flow of the armies right up to yesterday. It remains as certain of continuance as the unseen forces which inspired it from the beginning and raised its walls and towers.

  Here again I could wish that the Poles transliterated so famous a name in order that we of the West could read it the more easily. As it is spelt for us we read it ill or not at all. Yet the pronunciation is simple enough. Transliterated it runs ‘Chenstohova,’ and there is no difficulty in pronouncing that. But the native spelling cuts it off from us. So much for Czenstohowa. I could hope that the shrine retains the memory of one pilgrim, even dimly, as Strongly as that pilgrim retains the scene of Czenstohowa.

  I wonder how many of those few Englishmen who go into Poland and feel something of the Polish Story have so much as seen Czenstohowa? It remains unspoken of in our letters. It was not even revealed to us when the attempt at framing a new Europe was made—and ruined by London and the Banks—after the victory of 1918. Czenstohowa has not even been subject to the general abuse which has fallen on most things Polish from the enemies of the Christian thing. Czenstohowa is not deliberately ignored. It is simply unknown, unrepeated in the Western tongue.

  Thorn

  §

  If the Partition was symbolised by the division of the Vistula into three parts—Cracow under the mountains going to Austria, Warsaw and the mid-course of the river to Prussia, its seizure by Prussia is Stamped upon the fate of Torun, for which the Western, German name is Thorn.

  Thorn also I have known both in the past when it was in the hands of its Prussian gaolers and now since its liberation.

  When Prussia held it it was singularly spared from the common fate of whatever Prussia mishandled.

  With Poznan it was otherwise. Potsdam under its German name of Posen was badly mauled by the putting up, to overshadow it and to vulgarise it, of an appalling modern castle, all howling of Berlin, which I think still stands. But, after all, Posen is some way to the west. It has an appreciable element of German people within it (12 per cent. I think I was told); and those Germans, like the English in the Irish towns, represent more than their mere numbers, for they have a large part of the commerce in their hands and of the administration. But Thorn was, for some reason, left alone. The invader had not done much more to it than put up German names at the Street corners and these are now gone. The only essentially Prussian thing in the place that I can recollect is the bridge, to which is attached a railway Station in the same manner. Both of them are what one might expect. But the town itself, and especially the heart of the town, has been preserved.

  The name of glory in Thorn is, of course, the name Copernicus, and there you may see his statue and that excellent Latin inscription: ‘He moved the earth and made the sun stand still.’

  If you would judge how human moods change, consider the fierce debate upon Copernicus. One party will have him a German, another party will have him a Pole—and the latter have the better case. Copernicus himself and the men of his day were alien to such violent emotions. They were occupied in much greater things—the assault upon and the defence of that intelligent faith whereby the culture of Poland had been formed and established and by which it Still lives. Nor did they think the discovery, or the guess, of the heliocentric thesis to be an all-important thing. To-day men talk as though it caused a revolution in the human mind. It did nothing of the sort. That revolution did not proceed from discovery. Discovery proceeded from it. You may hear fools say that Copernicus destroyed the old grandeur of this earth, our mortal habitation; that since his time it has been impossible to think of the earth as being all important as it was to our fathers, and so on, and so forth, in the extreme of rubbish. As though the earth had ceased to be the nourisher and progenitor of our human kind! As though man were not of this world! As though things beyond it were not foreign to him! As though it were not our only, though transitory, home!

  That certainly the round world is and that it remains. Those who call the globe which we inhabit a mere speck in the universe, a negligible thing, would do well to go about it on foot—as I have done. I have not gone all round it (I am sorry to say), but I have walked in the Middle West, over the Rockies, and on the Pacific, mile after mile and day after day, and I have walked from Toulouse to the sources of the Tagus and from the Pyrenees to St. James’s of Compostella, and sundry other walks have I taken, and I can tell you that to the man who walks, or even rides (though not to the man who goes by train, and still less to the man in the motor, and least of all to the man who flies), the earth is not only real, but very large indeed. It is man who becomes a speck on the earth, not the world; and yet he knows that immortal speck to be more important, not only than the globe, but than all the rest of the material universe around. Now this conviction also comes by walking, for in walking a man’s thoughts deal with profound things.

  The Vistula at Torun is broadening somewhat, but remains itself as indeed it does to the end, to the very Delta and the approach to the sea. There is about that great Stream something of an American quality, though it has banks more defined than those of the great American rivers, yet as one goes down it in one of the river Steamers (built, as are the American river Steamers, for dealing with continual shoals) one feels as one does on the American rivers; the Vistula is a personality building up a whole countryside.

  The navigation in my experience is amusing. Among other things you will find that when the Steamer touches at a point to land passengers and goods, it does literally ‘touch’ the bank of any wharf along which it lies. It gently rams its nose into the shelving shore, lies there till its task is accomplished, then tugs out again under reversed engines, swinging round to the Stream, and pursues its way.

  There is another amusing feature about the Vistula banks, and that is the very neat little German villages and their contrast with the Polish settlements in the midst of which they stand. This contrast would, I am sure, to many a modern Western observer be all in favour of the intruders, the colonising little German groups. For, as I have said, they have neatness; we admire that which is like ourselves, and our admiration is the greater in proportion to our ignorance of men. There is no harm done. Neatness and flower-boxes never yet won a battle, nor did tightness of uniform, nor the goose step, nor loud cries of SHALLOO-HUMP! on parade. It is true that great strictness and steadiness of attitude are with some peoples a moral support to soldiering, and are therefore indirectly useful in war. But then, for other peoples, so far from being a moral support they are a nuisance and therefore a weakness.

  I remember the remarks of two men belonging to two very different and opposing nations. One of them said of a regiment of the other on the march that it was like a Straggling mob, or a lot of school boys out for a walk. The other said, with a shrug, of the regiment on the opposing side that it was like a corps de ballet.

  Many a beautifully cleaned and polished gun has been lost and many a gun caked with mud outside and drawn by harness tied up with String has helped to win great battles.

  There is a sentence in a modern book which I love to quote and perhaps quote too often. It was written of one of the principal commanders of the Great War and of his attitude towards the forces of a great ally. It ran like this: ‘He was a man of his own time and place and could not understand that a paunchy little fellow in pince-nez and ill shaven might be a better Strategist than himself, and even a better leader of men.’

  And here I am reminded of those very necessary men called pilots. In most parts of the world the pilot prides hims
elf on being utterly unlike the Stage sailor. He wears shabby civilian clothes and a little bowler hat. Yet it is he who knows every yard of the tortuous channel and the twisting of the tides and it is he who has undisputed command of the perilous passages that lead to safety.

  Let no one despise ornament even in soldiering, even on the sea, but let no one mistake ornament for the substantive thing adorned. ‘Dress them how you will,’ said one advising the Neapolitan Bourbon in the famous Story, ‘dress them how you choose; they will always run away.’ But it does not follow that the carefully dressed and groomed are not good soldiers. They are commonly the best of soldiers. And so much for that.

  Thorn, I say, had not been, when I last saw it under its Prussian masters, too much vulgarised. It had been spared from a sort of negligence and contempt.

  Warsaw

  §

  But with Warsaw it was otherwise. When the Russians held Warsaw they put up in the main square of the town an enormous, brand-new orthodox church swearing violently with the architecture all around. A thing which might have come straight out of Moscow, or out of some giant’s toy shop. It Stood there in the main square of Warsaw, almost filling it up, as my dim memory goes after all these years, crowding it out, as it were—a bully, forcing the people of the place out of its way and crying aloud that it was Moscow and meant to remind us. It has gone.

  Nothing was more Startling, when I came to see Warsaw again after all those years, than the disappearance of this huge thing. The Poles have pulled it down and (to use the archaic and hieratic English so dear to many moderns) ‘there was not left of it a stone upon a stone.’

  I think this negative experience is the Strongest memory I have of Warsaw then and now; Warsaw as it was in 1912 and Warsaw revisited.

  In another corner of Europe, and a more modest one, there has also been a destruction on a much lesser scale: on the bank of the Boyne River.

  The Boyne River has seen many things. Among other things it has seen hurled into its waters by the Black and Tans a Non-conformist clergyman whom the Black and Tans mistook (by his collar) for a local priest. The Boyne has seen the crossing of Dutch William’s army under its officers and its hotch-potch regulars of Hollanders, Germans, Huguenots and the rest. It saw old Schomberg fall, shot from behind apparently by his own troops. It saw an army overwhelmingly superior, nearly twice as numerous in men, infinitely better trained and with four-fold the artillery of its opponents, fail to get a decision in spite of such a crushing superiority.

  The Boyne, having thus been a thorough blunder, at once became the symbol of complete victory. To commemorate that victory there was a monument upon the northern shore, and when I went over that ground to write upon the battle I remember marking this monument which was, if my memory serves me right, a sort of obelisk; but later men came in the night and blew it up.

  They had better have left it where it was for it had no offensive power and it marked a site. They have not, I am glad to say, destroyed the monument at Austerlitz. At least they had not destroyed it when I was last there. But they have got rid of the name. I had hired a car in the town called by the euphonious name of Brn and I asked the man to drive me to the field of Austerlitz, which is only a few miles away. He assured me vigorously that there was no such place. I was bewildered. I knew the campaign pretty well and the details of the battle, and I was familiar, as are, I believe, many others, with the name of Austerlitz. Indeed, I can tell you of a house in Oxford which was called Austerlitz by those whose sympathies lay with the victorious side, whereupon their neighbours, whose sympathies lay elsewhere, called their house ‘Sedan.’

  Well, when I asked the motor driver to take me to Austerlitz and when I had heard there was no such place I went back and bought the most modern map I could get in the town, and sure enough the name Austerlitz had disappeared. In its place was printed in bold letters the name ‘Slavka.’

  Will it ever be the same with Waterloo I wonder! Outrageous people have done something of the same sort to Hastings—not the town but the battlefield. The Odericus Vitalis talked of it a century after as ‘Senlac.’ No one else did. The people who fought there and their sons and great grandsons all called it the Battle of Hastings, but Lingard finding this in Odericus Vitalis adopted it for the sake of learning. Then old Freeman came along and did a characteristic thing. He pinched Senlac (without acknowledgment) from Lingard. It is a point of honour at Oxford never to mention Lingard’s work although it is the foundation of all they know in the way of our home history (such as it is). Freeman, I say, pinched ‘Senlac’ and proudly raised it to its modern eminence, and to-day there are thousands who go about calling the Battle of Hastings the battle of Senlac as a proof of their enormous learning. However, as I said, Waterloo still Stands. The French name for it was Mont St. Jean, but I am told that in Germany it is still called La Belle Alliance.

  The Battle of the Muscowa has been re-baptised Borodino, which was always the native name, and that change has stuck. But one battle will, I think, always keep its name, for there is no other name for it, and that is the Battle of Warsaw which saved the western world. The invading army had everything its own way until within a march of the city when the counter-Stroke threw it back and saved Europe from what would have been Communism, for the Germans of those days, in the great cities at least, were ripe for the change. The German dockers of Dantzig had refused to unload ammunition which had arrived for the service of the Polish army.

  As Sobieski, throwing back the Mahommedans from Vienna, so Pilsudski throwing back that rush which so singularly resembled the Mohammedan invasion of Syria, saved for a second time the culture of the Occident: each of them were Poles.

  Pilsudski saved not only Europe but Warsaw, and to Warsaw my mind returns before leaving Baltic things.

  Warsaw suffers, as does Madrid, from the artificiality of its origin, or rather of its origin as a national capital and seat of the government, for Warsaw was made the capital by a decision of some three and a half centuries ago, or a little more, just as Madrid was made the capital of Spain at the same time. The making of Madrid the capital of Spain was certainly a blunder: they wanted elbow room and there was no elbow room in Toledo, but Madrid is too close to Toledo; the national tradition centres in Toledo and not in Madrid. Madrid could never show one of those great mediæval cathedrals which are the chief among the innumerable glories of Spain; there were no ballads attaching to Madrid; there was no Christ of the Light in Madrid. It is fitting that during the present war the chief aft of heroism should have been performed at the Alcazar of Toledo. Madrid means for those who follow the Spanish Civil War little more than the failure of an attack upon a modern great town, the difficulty of fighting in a modern great town, the agglomeration of proletarians and therefore of revolutionaries in a modern great town. Its fate does not move the foreigner as though it were the fate of Spain itself, whereas the relief of the Alcazar of Toledo moved all Christian Europe like a trumpet. One might almost say it was worth the while of the Spanish patriots to delay those few days for the relief of the Alcazar, for though it lost them Madrid it gave them a certain spiritual asset which they will not lose.

  §

  Warsaw had at least a good reason for becoming the capital because it was central to that vast extent of flat land over which the nominal boundaries of the Poles fluctuate so enormously: so that one never knows whether to say that Poland by rights should extend to this or to that boundary upon east or west. But wherever you put the boundaries, Warsaw would always have something central about it.

  Also Warsaw stands upon that central river, the Vistula, round which Poland is built up, and by the way, nowhere more than at Warsaw does that river give the aspect of one of the great American rivers to which I have already compared it. The great modern mechanical bridges, as well as the rise and fall in the level of the Stream, and the rough banks and the Straggling buildings upon them, all give that impression. It would, I suppose, be impossible to give Warsaw a regular alignment of qu
ays on either side; the fluctuations of the level are too great, and the expense would be very heavy indeed, but the effect would be noble.

  Warsaw carries a Strong tradition of the past, much Stronger than does that other late-chosen capital Madrid. There is a deep impress of the eighteenth century and its graciousness upon the town of Warsaw. The Palace and the churches recall upon either side the chief function of Poland, which has been the maintenance of an outpost: the outpost of our Western culture and civilisation beyond the Germanies and against Asia.

  When Pilsudski won his famous battle he did more than save the city called by its name (the Battle of Warsaw). He saved, as I have said, everything east of the Rhine. It looks as though the Germans may not have been saved for a much better fate. It looks as though another barbarism, almost as bad as the modern barbarism of Moscow, were to take the place of the German culture, for that culture shrieked when Vienna fell.

  But one must leave all that to time. There is something so mechanical and fulsome about all this violent experiment led by the clique in Berlin calling themselves National Socialist that it is clearly incapable of endurance. What the modification will be we cannot tell, but modification there must be, and that soon and widespread. The Germans have about them many qualities, few evil, most of them good. They are a people of affectionate hearts, and for the most part of delightful manners in conduct with their fellow beings and with foreigners. They have the happiness to be sentimental, and they have interesting architectural imagination, which has produced beauty in the past when it was allied with a rational philosophy. It is producing monstrosities to-day when it is allied to the opposite thereof: for the hideousness of modern building is nowhere so hideous as among the Germans.